


Old Earth

by blanketed_in_stars



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Post-Canon, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 04:09:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15766299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blanketed_in_stars/pseuds/blanketed_in_stars
Summary: “What are you doing here?” Bucky demands, and cocks the gun. The click is sharp. “I’m armed,” he says, pitching his voice to be heard over the ever-constant rumbling, and repeats it in Russian in the off-chance it’s another stupid kid from town.The hand twitches on the banister. The fingers tighten momentarily on the wood, knuckles white and then pink again. “I just came in to get out of the wind,” the voice says.That voice. Seized by a sudden, horrible hope that’s crushed immediately by the hard certainty ofplease, pleaseand his fingers red against the earth, Bucky nearly drops the gun. He adjusts his grip, swallows. “Put your hands up,” he orders, “and stand where I can see you.”





	Old Earth

**Author's Note:**

> This story was the initial idea to fill the prompt which eventually became _[a foreign country](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14315826),_ but after a few months' delay it's finally here in its own right! As with so much of my writing, this story was helped along by lots of upsetting conversation with [Audrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palebluedot), who is always so encouraging and supportive - thanks Audrey!!! And thank you to [starmaki](http://starmaki.tumblr.com) for providing the initial inspiration!

He’s grown used to the noise by now: the way the wind sweeps in over the fields, rattles in the tall grass, sends the clouds rolling high above in an undertow so strong it roars in his ears like the sea, like a pulse, like a speeding train. To say he hardly hears it anymore would be a lie—but he loses himself in it, sweats and stretches and razes and sleeps in the dull volume of it.

The footsteps intrude upon the small silence of the house, small because the walls can’t keep out the shuddering of the failing wooden siding, and the soft sounds jolt Bucky into wakefulness. He reaches for the gun before his eyes are fully open and his fingers find the metal cold and waiting. Blinking in the gloom, he thinks of the possibilities. Natasha and Sam said they’d stay away after the last time. T’Challa’s long since given up, and who could blame him? And Tony never came after him in the first place. It could be HYDRA, it could be SHIELD. His feet glide silently over the worn floorboards.

From downstairs, a voice says something just barely unintelligible. A deep voice, left of the stairs, probably in the hall. One eye around the corner—a hand rests on the chipped banister. “Who are you?” Bucky barks, sleep making his words rougher. “What do you want?”

There’s no response for a long, still moment. “Where—”

“What are you doing here?” he demands, and cocks the gun. The click is sharp. “I’m armed,” he says, pitching his voice to be heard over the ever-constant rumbling, and repeats it in Russian in the off-chance it’s another stupid kid from town.

The hand twitches on the banister. The fingers tighten momentarily on the wood, knuckles white and then pink again. “I just came in to get out of the wind,” the voice says.

That voice. Seized by a sudden, horrible hope that’s crushed immediately by the hard certainty of _please, please_ and his fingers red against the earth, Bucky nearly drops the gun. He adjusts his grip, swallows. “Put your hands up,” he orders, “and stand where I can see you.”

Slow, slow, the hand leaves the banister, and the man walks around with his head bowed slightly, his face hidden, hands in the air. Bucky’s eyes register the paleness of his skin and the shock of blond hair, and then he looks up.

Bucky doesn’t drop the gun, but he pulls the trigger, a convulsion, a spasm in time with the paroxysm of his heart.

———

_“This Stark guy seems like a piece of work if you ask me,” Bucky says. The alcohol isn’t helping at all. “Who even makes a machine like that?”_

_Steve shakes his head and grins at him—from half a foot above Bucky’s head. Bucky keeps doing double-takes if he’s not looking directly at him, convinced it’s some giant that just happens to look like Steve, and it’s always a jolt to realize the truth. “Honestly, that wasn’t even the craziest thing he’d cooked up.” Steve leans forward. “He spent all day injecting me with stuff to prep for Erskine’s serum, and then he took me around his workshop so I could see ‘the world of tomorrow.’ Like at that fair, but he had more than just the car. Some kind of wacky gun, a time machine, this one contraption he swore would—”_

_“No, hold on, back up. Did you say a time machine?”_

_“Yeah.” Steve smirks at whatever face Bucky’s making. “Proud as a peacock. He told me to get in and see if it worked.”_

_Bucky chokes on the last drops in his glass. “And you did?”_

_“Of course, blockhead.” And there’s the ornery scorn Bucky’s missed, the disdain that had made this new body seem utterly foreign. He drinks it greedily from Steve’s expression, the swing of his shoulders—too big, now—as he shrugs. “Anyways, it didn’t do a damn thing.”_

———

Only now, eighty-some years later, does Bucky realize that Steve must have been lying.

———

Steve flinches and the bullet buries itself in the wall behind him. “Jesus _Christ,”_ he says, “I _said_ I only—” Straightening, Steve breaks off to stare at him, and Bucky stares back with his hands still clenched around the gun. The moment hangs between them, stretched so taught it could skin them alive. “Bucky,” Steve says at last, a little uncertain, “it’s just me, what—”

In one swift motion, Bucky flicks the safety back on and drops the gun down to his side. The name is on his tongue but he can’t say it, won’t. “What the hell.” He spits the question out like a curse. He shouldn’t have lowered the gun. It could be a trap. But Bucky would know him anywhere, even like this. The pain rises in his throat and threatens to choke him. “Stark, right?” he asks to stave it off.

Still wide-eyed, Steve nods.

“Where’s the thing?” Bucky asks, stowing the gun in his waistband and starting down the stairs. “Where’s the _machine?”_ he demands when they’re face-to-face and Steve still hasn’t answered. Blue eyes and bone. The dark of the hall hides the worst of it.

Steve jabs a thumb over his shoulder. “The crossroads, it’s—what happened to you?”

Bucky’s already moving. “You don’t wanna know.”

———

Like a cockroach, the machine is on its back and leaking a fluid that smells like engine oil. Bucky stands with his hands on his hips and notices half a dozen pieces of metal scattered around it as well, as if the impact of arrival jarred a few parts loose.

“It opened fine,” Steve is saying, “I mean, I could climb out, but I think it’s broken.”

Bucky silently agrees. The wind whips gravel into his eyes. Without a word he drags it into the bed of the truck, straps it in. He can feel Steve’s eyes on his left hand and wrist when the flannel sleeve flaps in the gales. “Come on,” he says as he yanks open the driver side door.

A few moments pass before Steve comes around to the passenger side and gets in with a whine from the hinges. The truck was a piece of shit when it was new, and it’s as far past its natural lifespan as Bucky is. The engine competes with the wind for dominance, the dirt road jolts them back and forth in their seats, and Bucky glances at Steve every ten seconds, fearful, furious. They don’t speak all the way back to the house.

———

“So,” Steve says. The word falls heavy. Bucky looks over his shoulder to see Steve sitting at the table, surveying him from head to toe. The day is breaking outside and it suffuses the room with a pale light, one that picks out the chips and cracks in the paint of the cupboards and somehow also softens the angles of Steve’s face. His gaze shifts from Bucky to the window behind him. “Where are we?”

Bucky turns back to the sink, flips on the tap. “Siberia.” The water splashes dully against the bottom of the pot.

“Looks like shit,” Steve comments. “I thought this house was abandoned when I saw it from the road.”

Christ. Bucky hadn’t thought he’d forgotten just how goddamn annoying Steve can be. He frowns out the window at the fields: they’re growing all right. And the house, well— “It’s intentional,” Bucky says, setting the pot on the stove.

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Are you in hiding?”

In a manner of speaking, Bucky supposes he is, but that’s not really the truth of it. “I don’t want people just showing up here,” he says as he reaches into the cupboard, pulls out the box of oats.

He can tell from Steve’s frosty silence that he hears the unspoken words: _that includes you._ But he doesn’t comment on that, just says, “What year is it?”

“It’s 2025,” Bucky tells him, lets that settle a moment the way he knows it has to. “June.”

Slowly, Steve says, “So you’re…”

He sounds almost as if he’s afraid, and Bucky was never a match for that. “A hundred and eight,” he confirms. He turns around and Steve’s running a hand through his hair, his lips slightly parted, staring at the grain of the table. “It’s the same stuff as Erskine’s serum,” Bucky says, trying to help him along. “Or close enough. I can’t get drunk, I heal fast, and I age like a goddamn turtle.”

In spite of it all, a smile tugs at the corner of Steve’s mouth, sharp as a knife. It stings. “So where am I these days?” he asks.

Bucky goes cold. “I told you, you don’t wanna know,” he says. “And I think that’s enough questions.”

“One more,” Steve insists.

A short breath out through his nose. “Fine.”

“Are we still fucking?”

It hits Bucky over the head, sends him reeling and knocks any lingering doubt from his mind. It’s Steve. He’s here. In another lifetime, he would laugh. “What do you think?” Bucky says, rough, and turns from Steve again, unable to bear the sight of him.

———

The sun sheds a clear light on the world. It warms Bucky’s skin as he kneels in the row, feeling the soft heads brush his back. From here he must look like an oddly-shaped rock if he’s visible at all, his head barely above the grain and so far from the house that he’s nothing more than a vague dark shape in the far reach of the field. He wraps his fingers around the weed and pulls, crushing the leaves and shaking clods of soil loose. Places it in the sack at his side. Reaches for another.

“Bored already?” he asks an hour in, not looking around. He doesn’t need to.

Steve’s sigh is lost in the sound of the wind, but Bucky knows it happened. “It’s like a monastery in there.” As he comes closer, his shadow falls on Bucky’s shoulders. “Are you weeding this entire field by hand?”

“There’s a cultivator in the barn,” Bucky replies, dragging the sack closer. “It’s missing a blade, though. And this keeps me busy.”

Steve sighs again. He wavers for a minute, not moving or leaving. Then he says, “Can I help?”

Bucky blinks in surprise. When Steve drops down to his knees beside him, he flinches.

Calmly, Steve uproots the weed closest to him. “We both gotta keep busy,” he says by way of explanation when Bucky is still frozen. He doesn’t add anything else, though Bucky waits for more. His hair hangs down and hides his eyes, brilliant even against the gold of the wheat. The motion of his hands is quick and sure.

There’s a strange, fragile feeling in Bucky’s chest. As if he might crack down the middle and shatter. He takes a breath and forces himself to move, to see the sun and not the dust and rubble. The smell of earth presses into his skin.

———

It doesn’t last, of course. Bucky doesn’t normally dream these days, is used to the black oblivion of the night and welcomes it at last after a century of terrors. But tonight he can feel himself screaming, wakes up only when he falls out of the bed and hits the floor hard. A light flicks on in the hall. A fist pounds on his door.

He doesn’t reach for the gun this time. “‘M okay,” he rasps, clambering back to his feet using the side of the bed as leverage. His pulse has slowed already: they never did figure out if that was the serum or the training. There’s blood in his mouth from the raw spot in his cheek.

When Bucky opens the door, Steve is still standing there, leaning on the wall. The couch cushions have left a faint red line on his skin and Bucky’s sweatshirt hangs loosely from his shoulders. “Oh,” Steve says, and pauses with his mouth half-open.

Bucky pushes past him for the bathroom, spits into the sink. Leaves the light off. There were a few weeks that first winter, he remembers, where he hardly switched on a light at all—it didn’t seem worth the effort. It wasn’t necessary, with just him there. There was very little to trip over in the night.

But Steve is here now, or a version of him, sticking out of the usual pattern of his life like a trap he can’t help but fall into. He stands in the light of the hall and knots his hand in the worn fabric of the sweatshirt. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Just bit my cheek,” Bucky tells him, rinsing out his mouth with water. A glance in the mirror shows the sparse outline of his sleep-swollen face, hair hanging lank and tangled.

“You were pretty loud,” Steve says doubtfully. “Sounded like you were being attacked.” Bucky can feel his eyes on him as he stands hunched over the sink. “Buck?”

Bucky shies away from the soft sound of his voice. “Jesus, Steve, it was just a bad dream.” The name falls quickly from his lips without thought, though he knows it’s the first time he’s said it—he’d been so cautious, same as the sore bite in his mouth now, careful not to touch. “You need anything?”

“I—no,” Steve says.

“Then I’m gonna go back to bed.” He won’t actually tell Steve to go, doesn’t think he could ever do that, but it’s a clear dismissal and Steve takes it like one. His feet fall lightly on the stairs.

Outside, the wind shrieks as if Bucky had never stopped. He does go back to his room, but sleep is laughable. The dream is lost beyond recall, for which he’s grateful, and the cloudless sky is sprinkled thick with stars and a hole where the moon will be tomorrow. He can see to the horizon when he looks out the window. Too far west for the mountains, just far enough east to be alone. Or to try.

———

“So here’s what happened, far as I can figure,” Steve says, unprompted, as Bucky shoves a breakfast bowl towards him. “I listened to Howard Stark, okay, mistake number one. Got stranded here with you.” The way he says _you_ speaks of deep dislike and conjures up the hazy memory of a thousand light punches, a hundred crooked smiles. It twists like a knife in Bucky’s gut. “Not that this isn’t fun, but I should probably get back at some point.”

“But your machine’s broken,” Bucky interjects.

“Maybe not beyond repair, though.” Steve swirls his spoon around in his oatmeal. “I’m guessing you don’t know much about Stark engineering?”

Ha. Bucky chuckles. “I know a fair amount,” he says. “I’ll take a look at it today, see if I can figure anything out.”

That doesn’t seem to satisfy Steve the way it should. He’s still frowning down into his bowl, and then he looks up at Bucky with a furrowed brow. “How’d you know, yesterday morning?” he asks. “That it was Stark’s, I mean.”

Bucky hesitates. In the few scattered moments during the past twenty-nine hours when he’s been able to think clearly, he’s figured some things out for himself as well. Enough to be sure that Steve either lied to him for years or had no memory of this incident. Enough to be wary of revealing anything, of causing damage, of hurting him more than he already will be. And still Steve’s watching him, waiting for an answer. “My arm’s inspired by Stark’s designs,” he says finally, stretching it out in front of himself for Steve to see.

Steve’s eyes light up and he leans forward to take a closer look. “I never imagined anything like this,” he says, mesmerized at the sight of Bucky wiggling his fingers. “A lot changes in eighty-two years, huh?”

That puts a phantom pain in Bucky’s throat. “There’s a lot more than this thing,” he says.

“Stark’s flying car,” Steve says, “what about that, does it really work now?”

Bucky has to pull the memory from far, far back. It’s always hardest with the ones just before the fall: he can remember with perfect clarity the feel of bathwater from the first apartment he lived in with his ma, but the details of his life in the year leading up to the war are nearly lost to him now. Dimly, he hears applause, feels someone leaning on his shoulder, stiff hair-sprayed curls brushing against his neck. “Nah,” he says, blinking back to the present to find the past meeting his gaze. “That one never took off. But there’s other stuff that puts it to shame. Whole buildings that go up in the sky.” Cities, sometimes, he thinks darkly, but Steve doesn’t need to know about that. He’ll find out eventually.

And Bucky was always the one with the passion for science, anyways. Steve is still fixated on the arm, on what he can see in front of him. “When did you get this?”

“Not sure,” Bucky says, glad that the evasion is the truth. He pulls his arm back before Steve can work up the courage to touch it.

Steve sits back, too. “What should I do,” he asks, “while you’re busy with the machine?”

It gives Bucky pause. He should have known, though—Steve never could sit idle for long. “You could, um.” What the hell could he do? When Bucky first came out here, sharing the load with another person had been the furthest thing from his mind. He hadn’t planned for anyone else. “You can do whatever you want to do,” he says, spreading his hands wide.

———

It wasn’t a lie, what he told Steve at breakfast. The arm really is based off of Stark’s old prototypes. It turns out that the cast-offs of a genius are still pretty damn good—though Steve had used different words when they found the notes and blueprints, standing in that cobwebbed lab. Because it wasn’t just the arm; it was the chair and the cryotank as well, and it had taken a while before Tony would look Bucky in the eye.

So he knows his way around Stark’s inner workings. But this, Bucky thinks, contemplating the husk of the time machine, might throw him for a loop. It’s not that he can’t tell what’s wrong with it: the pieces he gathered off the ground look like they’ll fit together logically enough. It probably doesn’t take batteries, though.

Tony might know. Shuri definitely would. But if he asked them for help then he’d have to explain, and they would look at him with that old pity, and it turns his stomach just thinking about it. No. Bucky rolls up his sleeves and starts sifting through the gears and scraps. The metal is heavy against the fingers of his right hand, sometimes slick with grease, and those bits he wipes carefully with a rag.

He’s working in the barn, so he doesn’t notice the noise immediately—here, as in the field, the wind is so much louder that he misses most sounds quieter than speech, even with his serum-enhanced hearing. It’s there, though, like a tiny mechanical heartbeat. Ticking, from somewhere inside the machine.

Carefully, Bucky starts unscrewing pieces and lifting panels, searching for the source. He makes note of each step so he can put it back together again. What exactly he’s looking for, he doesn’t know: maybe a set of gears, a fine-tuned timer counting down, some kind of failed circuit. He doesn’t find any of that. Instead he reaches into a crack in the inner chamber of the machine and pulls out a watch on a dull leather strap, torn half an inch above the buckle.

Holding it in his hand gives Bucky the sense of going up a staircase and expecting one more step than there is. A sickening lurch of his stomach, feeling the leather between his fingers, the heavy metal on his palm. He brings it into the house. “Steve?”

A second passes before Steve comes around the corner. “Yeah?”

“Found your watch in the machine.” Bucky thrusts it at him.

“Oh, great!” Steve takes it and winds it, just as Bucky knew he would, and the motion is so unhurried and unconscious, so intimately familiar that Bucky could swear he’s seeing double. Triple. The Steve in their Brooklyn apartment, the Steve in front of his eyes, and the Steve from two years ago in Montreal, DC, Lviv. The same twist of the wrist, steady grip of the fingertips.

Steve is looking at him with more suspicion than he likes to see. “What?”

Bucky averts his gaze. “Just funny.” It’s not funny at all; it hurts. “You had that watch until a few years ago.”

“This one?” Steve dangles it from the broken strap, amazed.

“Worked like new the whole time,” Bucky tells him. He itches to go back to the barn, to get away from the dizziness. “I’ll get you a new strap when I go into town tomorrow. I need more gas and, um, milk, I think.”

“I want to come,” Steve says immediately.

“To the store?”

Steve meets Bucky’s eyes and there’s no room for argument. “I went eighty years forward in time and I haven’t seen a fucking thing except for this farm,” he says. “I want to come. Even some small town in Siberia’s farther than I ever went at home.”

He’s so determined. Bucky had thought for years that the serum had amplified that, worse, given Steve the power to put behind his stubbornness—but he’s starting to think that it was all packed inside this little body already, burning in his veins and blazing out through his eyes. He wants to tell Steve: _just wait a few weeks._ ’43 was the year it happened. _Just wait, you’ll go so far. You won’t be able to see home from where you end up._ He doesn’t say it. Just nods, goes out, returns to the barn.

———

Steve tries to start a conversation a few times while they’re in the car, making the long drive to the nearest town. There’s not much else to do besides talk, given the mundanity of the landscape and the incessant bump of the road beneath the tires, and Steve doesn’t give up even though Bucky keeps his answers short and his hands clenched on the steering wheel. When they reach the town, though, population ninety-two and dwindling, Steve stands on the cracked asphalt parking lot and is silent.

Bucky isn’t sure if he’s disappointed at the run-down general store or shocked by the billboard looming over it, advertising a sex store in faded cyrillic. “Looks like shit?” Bucky guesses.

Steve blinks and looks around. Apart from a few houses, with their peeling paint and sagging front stoops, the gas station, and the road they drove in on, there’s really nothing else to see. “Looks like someone broke a tenement building into pieces,” he says, squinting against the wind.

“So, like shit.” Bucky leads the way into the store, nods to Olesya at the counter, and goes down an aisle.

Steve follows a few feet behind. “There’s so much,” he says. “Is that a future thing, or a Siberian thing?”

“Future.” Bucky scoops three cans of soup off the shelf. “This is nothing.”

“You keep saying that.” Steve’s tone is judgmental in a way that Bucky can’t quite parse, but a second later he says, “What’s that?”

Steve’s pointing at a row of colorful plastic bags, the kind that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the giant new stores Bucky always avoided when they were still living in New York. “Dried squid,” he tells Steve, smirking at the face he makes. “You eat it with beer.”

“None for you, then.” Steve moves along the aisle, staring at all the labels and packages and logos in fascination.

Bucky forces his feet to keep moving, too. He’d forgotten momentarily that he’d told Steve he couldn’t get drunk, and he’s surprised, with the situation what it is, that Steve didn’t. What else has he been remembering, noticing without mentioning, filing away for further contemplation? It’s been a long time since Bucky’s felt like this: watchful, vulnerable, caught off-guard. Too long. But it was always like that between them, he knows, even if it’s atrophied in the time since—

They reach the end of the aisle and turn, and Bucky takes big canisters of oil from the bottom shelf, gives the soup to Steve to hold. Milk from the whining, rattling refrigerator, and a watch strap snagged off the aisle cap next to the glasses repair kit. Bucky piles it all onto the counter and adds the soup cans to the top.

Steve, he notices, is standing transfixed as Olesya rings up the total. “Спасибо,” Bucky tells her. She smiles at him, and watches Steve as curiously as he’s watching her as they leave the store.

The reaction, though, when they’re bumping back towards the farm, is not the enthusiasm that Bucky expected, that he thought he’d seen in Steve’s face. Instead Steve leans his elbow on the door and rests his temple on his knuckles. “What is this, Buck?”

“What?”

“I mean, what the hell are you doin’ out here?” He asks it quietly enough, but there’s heat there, too, and something else that’s lost in the noise of the engine. “You’re a hundred and eight, you got a metal arm, why are you doin’ this?”

Bucky glances over to see Steve glaring at the monotonous fields around them. “Gotta live somewhere.”

“Oh, shut up,” Steve snaps. “You don’t fool me, playing farmer out here or whatever the fuck this is. You hate it, I can tell.”

“I don’t hate it,” Bucky says. “I was doing fine before you showed up.”

“So it’s me you hate?”

“What? No!” Bucky is seized by the sudden urge to pull over and yell at Steve on the shoulder of this deserted road, or maybe just to walk into the overgrown field until his legs won’t go anymore. He keeps driving straight ahead. “I don’t hate you,” he insists. “I could never.” But the words are so sharp they cut his mouth and send spikes of pain down his throat, because it’s almost true. He hates—not Steve, but what he represents, what he forces into the light. More than anything he hates what it reveals about himself, now. What the years have turned him into.

Steve’s voice is much quieter when he speaks again, but Bucky can’t tell if Steve’s convinced by his outburst or if he even meant it to begin with. “The Bucky I know,” he says, “wouldn’t live like this. Alone. Angry.”

And that’s the heart of it, isn’t it? Bucky clenches his jaw until he can speak normally, until the tightness in his chest relaxes. “Maybe I’m not him,” he says. “Maybe you don’t know me anymore.”

———

Dawn breaks over the fields and the house, and Bucky pauses on the steps. The dusty gray light seeping in through the window lends a stark clarity to the living room. The neatly folded pile of too-big clothes next to the couch, suspenders tangled on top. Bent and warped bookshelf casting shadows across the wall. And Steve, being swallowed by the couch and covered in a blanket, hair over his eyes and one hand dangling towards the floor.

It tugs on Bucky’s heart. He walks the rest of the way down the stairs, goes to the window and lets the blinds fall shut. Still, a strip of early sun hits Steve’s face. He looks—Bucky swallows hard—unbearably young, sleeping there. The even rise and fall of his chest is the only sign that he’s alive, and Bucky clings to it in the grip of a sudden wave of—what? Love? Grief? Either way, it hurts. And the two don’t seem so different these days.

The sky is candy-blue and lined with thin clouds by the time Steve joins him in the barn, bringing a mug of—“Coffee?” He’s less incredulous than amazed, and more than a little touched.

Steve drinks from his own mug and doesn’t look at him.

So it’s a ceasefire, but not a truce. “Thanks.” Bucky wipes his hands on a rag and takes a sip. He watches Steve inspect the machine—it’s half-built, now, getting worse before it gets better, but Bucky’s not really any closer to figuring out what makes it run. The oily fluid had turned out to be little more than engine grease.

“What’s that part?” Steve asks, nodding towards the hunk of metal and wires that Bucky had been working on.

Bucky lifts it up. “Near as I can tell, it’s a regulator.” Steve gives him a blank look. “It, uh, regulates.” He rolls his eyes at himself. “It controls for balance, whether that’s speed or fuel flow or something else—your watch has one. Lots of stuff does. But I’ve never come across anything that regulates _time.”_ He frowns at it, at the filaments dangling like entrails.

“Maybe it’s permanent,” Steve suggests. “Whatever’s damaged. What if it can’t be fixed?”

“I don’t think so,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “Otherwise you’d never have come back, would you? But you didn’t vanish off the face of the earth in 1943.”

“That’s reassuring.” But now Steve’s gaze turns thoughtful. “So I’m—I’m guessing we won the war?”

 _Which one?_ Bucky is tempted to ask. But he nods. “Eventually.”

“And—then what?”

Bucky eyes him apprehensively. “What do you mean?” he asks, although he knows. It was only a matter of time.

“What did we do after the war?” Steve asks. He’s looking at Bucky now.

It’s like something from a dream, the easy way _we_ trips off Steve’s tongue like it’s never come into question for him. And Bucky supposes it hasn’t. Steve comes from that gritty, dusty, iron, war-torn world, with all of its atrocities and horrors and with the two of them bound up in one skin, one life. Despite everything that’s changed since then, Bucky isn’t sure how much he’d trade to have it back, the way they were then. Even knowing what would come.

He sighs. “After the war,” he says, and stops. “I don’t know how much I should tell you.” He sees the spark of another argument lighting in Steve’s eyes. “You don’t want to know everything that’s gonna happen,” he protests, and even that’s a bit of a giveaway, but he has to say something. He has to make Steve understand that the truth will hurt him.

“So just tell me some of it,” Steve says, flat and stubborn.

“I—I don’t want to,” Bucky says. The admission costs more than he expects.

Steve uncrosses his arms, takes a step forward. “Please.”

“I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t, really. To anyone.” He glances away. “Not even to you.” He could never stomach it. And the most important parts never needed to be said.

But this is now; he’s learning something about what he can and can’t stomach. He sighs. “After the war, I didn’t see you for a while,” he says. “It was… bad. You could say.” He looks at Steve and forces himself to smile. “And then it was good. For a few years, it was real good.” He swallows; he can’t keep the smile there any longer.

“And now?” Steve asks.

Bucky isn’t sure if he’s asking in general, or about the last three and a half days. He shrugs, motions with his chin at the endless rippling expanse of wheat, the horizon that eats up the earth. “I’m here, aren’t I?” He turns away. It’s growing old, the turning, but he doesn’t know how to do anything else. “Take your best guess.”

———

Something changes in Steve after that, and Bucky isn’t sure how much of it he’s imagining. He notices it when Steve goes rooting through the cabinets and fixes coffee for the two of them, sure, but also when he comes inside to find Steve dozing on the couch, head leaning precariously on his elbow. When the sound of humming reaches him from the other room and he finds himself adding the words in his head: _and ships will sail again all over the world…_

It takes Bucky by surprise. He’s never known Steve Rogers to take something sitting down, let alone to accept a bad thing as something he can’t change. If that were the case Bucky would have stayed dust and ash; hell, he would have died on Zola’s operating table. Steve fights, even when it’s hopeless. This is an unalterable truth in Bucky’s mind. But here he is, settling in, and Bucky would call it capitulation if he couldn’t sense something simmering under the surface.

“Got any music?” Steve asks him one evening as the rain pelts the windows and makes the whole house groan. They’re sitting on the floor—Steve doodling in the margins of an age-yellowed newspaper, Bucky examining half a dozen pieces of the time machine that he’s sure fit together somehow. When Bucky looks at him blankly, Steve continues. “A radio? Records?”

As it happens, Bucky does have records, a fraction of their old collection, whatever they could scrounge up when they surfaced in this century. And he brought them with him when he moved here out of some mysterious sentimentality. “I think so,” he hedges.

He’s a better liar than Steve, but Steve’s sharp, attuned to him like a satellite these days. “Where are they?” he asks, already moving to get up.

“I got it,” Bucky says before he can. He walks up the stairs feeling Steve’s eyes on his back and a pressure in his chest. Walking into this room—he opens the door, the knob cold and gritty with disuse under his palm—is like walking into a minefield, which is why he hasn’t done it in a year at least. And his neglect is why Steve hasn’t even bothered to glance at the door.

The room smells like old air and is darker than the rest of the house; the bare bulb has never worked. There’s little in here to trip on, anyways. Bucky crosses to the far wall and sinks to his knees, finds the box without needing to see. Opens it with silent gratitude for the black before his eyes. He pushes past the knit wool, past the worn and ragged spines, finds the thin dust sleeves stacked at the bottom. Pulls them out, tucks the portable player under his arm, and leaves the rest in disarray, suppressing a shiver when he turns his back to the box, shaking the lingering sensation from his fingertips.

“We got, um, Dick Haymes,” Bucky says when he’s facing Steve again, shuffling through the records. “Dooley Wilson, Vera Lynn—lots of Vera Lynn, actually…”

“All those war songs?” Steve wrinkles his nose.

Bucky shrugs. “Those are the ones that survived,” he says. “Romantic, you know.” He gets back down on the floor and pushes the stack towards Steve. “Here, you look. Pick whatever you want.”

Steve pores over the records, and Bucky can tell when he finds one that’s from ’44 or ’45 because he stares at it with the same wide gaze he used on Bucky’s arm that first morning. “Shit,” he says, holding one up, “Benny Goodman!” He’s grinning, and it sweetens his face like always, makes his eyes soft. It’s like a painting in the dim, rain-washed light. “Remember when we danced to this, right before you left for basic? And here it is!”

“It’s still kind of popular,” Bucky says neutrally. “If you like old music.”

Again, Steve sees through him. “You don’t remember,” he says, still smiling, but there’s an accusation there, too. “Do you?”

The lie is in Bucky’s throat, halfway to his lips. Yet he shakes his head without knowing exactly why.

The silent admission fills the room. “I guess it’s been a long time,” Steve says.

Maybe he’s weak. Maybe he’s just tired. But Bucky can’t bear to lie about this, not outright. “It’s not that,” he says. “I was made to forget it. To forget everything. For a while.” He’s never said it like this, so baldly, and certainly never to Steve.

If he’d had to guess at a reaction, he might have expected horror, revulsion, rage. Not this gentle expression creeping across Steve’s face, a melting of that contrary and headstrong will into something tender. Sad, but kind. “Well,” he says quietly. “I’m glad you remembered.”

“Me, too,” Bucky replies. It’s the truth, whole and unaltered.

Steve smiles and gets up. “This one,” he says decisively, sliding the record out of its liner and then hesitating when he turns to face the portable turntable.

So Bucky sets it up for him, unable to help smirking a little when Steve follows every motion as attentively as if it were a battle plan. He sets the tonearm on the record and the crackling is a harsh staccato. It mellows in a few seconds to lilting piano. “We danced to this, too, right?” Bucky asks, doubtful.

Steve nods. “Every once in a while. When I could convince you to stay in the apartment instead of goin’ to all those dance halls.”

Those, Bucky can recall somewhat. Big bright smoky places full of the smell of perfume, sweat, and alcohol. The apartment, though—“I don’t remember,” he says. “Sorry.” He sets his jaw against the sting of it.

“Don’t be,” Steve says. Slowly, he takes Bucky’s hands, both of them. “I remember,” he says, turning so they’re face-to-face, closer than they’ve been in four days. “It was like this.”

They’re sharing the same patch of ratty carpet, the same air. And there is something familiar after all about Steve’s hands, one holding his, the other at his waist. A reflex, maybe, but Bucky pulls him closer all the same, his own hand on the small of Steve’s back. Despite that, Steve is leading, because Bucky’s body is leaden and electric all at once and he doesn’t think he could move on his own if he tried.

“A little out of practice, huh?” Steve asks lightly, turning them in a slow circle.

Bucky shrugs. “We haven’t danced much since…” He isn’t sure. “Since the war, I guess.”

Steve nods thoughtfully. “That’s a shame.”

Since he can’t really say one way or the other, Bucky stays silent. His throat grows tighter with each shift of Steve’s body against his own, and he can barely breathe with the scent of the rain and fields thick between them. Earth and stone. He fights against a shiver, but no, there was no rain that day. Not that it would have reached them, anyways, in that mess of concrete and dust.

“What is it?” Steve asks, sensing the shudder.

Bucky clears his throat. “I forgot how good it feels.” He chooses the truth that hurts the least, but it still lances like a shock along his bones. He swallows, his mouth dry.

Lightning flashes white outside the windows. Steve steps closer, sways with the music and takes Bucky with him. The brass is tinny, the piano smooth by contrast, and the singer croons over it all. It makes Bucky think less of his own past and more of books and films, the few he’s absorbed, vestiges of a life that he’s not sure was ever really his. Though Steve would tell him about it often enough, the way he’s doing now. In a soft voice tinged with nostalgia but more so with joy and love and relief that they made it to the other side—

Steve leans in and brushes his lips against Bucky’s cheek, barely even a kiss. More of a question. And Bucky—a cracking sensation in his chest, in time with the thunder that shakes the house to its foundations—lets him ask it, turns his head and meets Steve’s waiting mouth. This, he could never forget. The memories go all the way back.

After a moment, Steve pulls back. He looks up at Bucky and then away. His face is bare and raw with—Bucky isn’t sure what, his eyes downcast and hidden beneath long lashes.

They could make a painting here, Bucky thinks, but a very different one from the tableau on the couch a few days ago. Dark and shadowed with something sad filling the air. And around them the music playing on.

———

The rain continues through the early hours of the morning, but it doesn’t stop Bucky from hurrying along the muddy path to the barn in the howling blackness. He’s fairly sure Steve won’t interrupt him right now, nothing more than a vague huddle of blankets on the couch, and that’s what he wants: a few moments of undisturbed concentration away from the ache inside him, which always sharpens when Steve is near. Maybe now he can finally make some progress.

He’s fit most of the machine back together again, and it all slots into place with the efficient showiness that he’s come to expect from Stark designs. He can even figure out where the fuel is stored; from the traces left behind, it seems to be ordinary motor fuel. So, nothing special there—no, what confounds him is the space beneath the seat, a compartment that survived the trip through time whole and undamaged and which Bucky is afraid to touch.

“Howard,” Bucky mutters, peering inside the machine by the annoyingly narrow beam of his flashlight, “what did you do?” Again, he has the fleeting thought to call Tony. But it shouldn’t matter, should it? Steve did wind up back in 1943, which means Howard’s tech worked the way he built it. Bucky frowns. It’s Howard he really wants to talk to, despite the insufferability of the man himself. He wishes he could reach through time and pull him—

Bucky cracks his head on the top of the hatch as he straightens up, and says _“Fuck!”_ so loudly that it echoes in the chamber of the machine. He steps back and stands staring at the compartment, the mystery of which is sloughing rapidly off like the gravel on the road outside as the torrent beats down. “You bastard,” Bucky says. His voice sounds dead to his own ears, and nearly lost in the rain.

He goes back to the house and stumbles, sopping, to the couch, but Steve isn’t there. Upstairs, he drips along the hall towards the bathroom, but pauses when he sees light seeping from under the door to the spare room. So faint he hadn’t noticed it in the blur of the storm outside, but here in the inky dark house he can tell. He opens the door.

Steve’s back is to him, shoulders poking bonily against his sweatshirt, and he doesn’t look around at Bucky’s entrance. He’s mostly in darkness, holding the spare flashlight between his ear and shoulder as he bends over whatever he’s holding in his hands. Bucky’s stomach turns over.

“This is mine,” Steve says, still not turning. His voice is nearly lost in the creaking of the house.

Bucky walks forward on wooden legs and looks over Steve’s shoulder. The light falls on the open page of a sketchbook filled with a drawing of Bucky half-naked in a messy bed. His eyes are closed, and he is smiling.

It’s not quite perfect, but staring at the sure, strong pencil strokes, rendered with so much care, Bucky is there again anyhow: their bedroom in late morning sun, the sheets warm, and Steve’s voice saying _close your eyes again, you look perfect like that._ His arm reaching across to grab the sketchbook, and Bucky pulling him in for a kiss, and Steve gasping at the chill of the metal arm. Both of them laughing into each other’s mouths.

The smaller Steve before him, still on his knees, gazing at the simple, wrenching truth, says, “I knew we were still together.”

Bucky has no reply. He nudges Steve’s shoulder instead. “I figured it out. I know how to get you home.”

———

The sky has turned from black to unforgiving slate by the time Bucky finishes explaining for the third time. He watches Steve frown at the sketchbook, now closed, on the table between them. “It’s a fucking shitty design,” Steve says at last.

Bucky can’t help but agree. Trust Howard to come up with a machine that can only be operated from one end. “Clever, though,” he admits. “A one-time use would prevent—I don’t know, somehow getting rid of your past self. Science fiction stuff.”

“Well, I went to the future.” Steve’s tone is irritable. “Small chance of that anyhow.” The gaze he turns on Bucky is impossible to read, but he moves on before Bucky can wonder just what he means. “So I have to—what was it, exactly?”

“There’s a compartment under the seat,” Bucky says yet again, leaning back to stare at the ceiling. “It’s welded shut, but I’m pretty sure it’s paired with something he’s still got back in ’43. Something powerful. That’s what controls the machine—”

Steve waves an impatient hand. “And the one we have here is broken. Or something. But what was that other part? Where do I come into it?”

“Those injections,” Bucky reminds him. He can practically see the bar around them again, taste the bitter burn in his throat. _The world of tomorrow,_ Steve had said—will say—God, it makes his head hurt. “The ones Howard gave you the day you left. They react with whatever he’s got in that box.”

“You think,” Steve interjects.

“I think,” Bucky agrees.

“Even Wells thought up better stuff than this,” Steve complains. “Why don’t we just open the box?”

“No,” Bucky says, the word tumbling out of his mouth before he can think. “We don’t _know_ what’s in it, or exactly how it works, and if we break it—”

“It’s already broken—”

“If we make it worse, then.” Bucky crosses his arms. “You’d be stuck here, without any way back. No, we have to wait.”

“For Howard to—pull some kind of trigger?” When Bucky nods, Steve scowls. “I’m gonna have some words with him when I get back.” And then he pauses, still looking at Bucky. “How’d you know?” he says. “That he gave me those shots?”

Ah. It’s getting harder to hold back the truth, somehow, Bucky is realizing—as if the dancing broke something in him. He says, “You told me about it.”

“When?”

How much can he say? How much can he risk? “A long time ago.”

Steve explodes. “Why are you so _fucking_ cryptic?” he demands, throwing up his hands. “Would it kill you to give me a straight answer for once? Just tell me a detail or two? I’m—I’m _lost_ here, Buck.” His voice is hard as his gaze. “What are you so afraid of?”

It would make Bucky laugh if the laughter hadn’t bled out of him long ago. Where to start? But looking at Steve, all furrowed brow and and fierce blue eyes, he comes as close to tears as he has in two years. Again, he has the feeling that something in him is fracturing. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says, looking away to study the grain of the table. “It wouldn’t help if I told you everything. It wouldn’t send you back, it wouldn’t make it easier.”

For a moment, Steve is silent. “Easier for me,” he says then, “or easier for you?”

Bucky shrugs. “Me, you,” he says, “doesn’t seem to matter much, huh?” Despite the distance between them now, he remembers what it was to share a whole life, to live practically within the same skin—he can _feel_ it, the way their bodies fit together. And he thinks Steve must remember too; of course, it’s closer for him, within easy reach of memory.

Steve’s mouth twists. Long heartbeats pass before he speaks again. When he does, it’s with a forced calm. “So we’re just waiting,” he says. “For Howard. Right?”

Bucky inclines his head. “Like I said.”

If anything, the confirmation makes Steve angrier, but all he says is, “I’m sick of scientists. Sick of being their puppet.”

This is a feeling Bucky knows intimately, attached as it is to the bones of his shoulder like a third arm, woven into the fibers of his brain and carved into the soles of his feet. And he feels it, in this small kitchen, the morning wind sweeping about the house, the rain slowly draining from the sky: the threads that connect them to each other, that tie them back to the past, unbreakable and so long that he can feel them tugging at his limbs, wrapping around his neck.

———

Bucky cleans the tools, puts the barn back in order from the disarray he left it in. He’s spattered in mud from his trips along the puddle-filled path, so he takes time to wash the grime away and change his clothes. It doesn’t help, but he already knew it wouldn’t. He isn’t sure it’s about helping anymore.

Steve finds him later, after a few hours of silence. He comes into the bedroom a little hesitantly, more cautiously than he’s done anything since he arrived. Steve wouldn’t know it, but it’s the same way he moved in the days when Bucky remembered only a sliver of his life, when he swung between terror and violence—the same careful steps, the same thought behind every motion. Bucky doesn’t look around or stop what he’s doing, just keeps folding clothes, though he owns little enough that it hardly matters.

When Steve speaks, his voice comes from a few feet behind: sitting on the bed, probably. “How’d it happen?” he asks.

 _How’d what happen,_ Bucky wants to ask. Instead he lets his hands fall still and clenches the right to stop it trembling. Steve Rogers has been an idiot many times, but he’s never been obtuse. It makes Bucky want to ask him when he figured it out, but he isn’t sure he wants to know the answer.

It isn’t a question of safety now, or of paradox. This knowledge will never affect him until it’s too late. And Bucky knows—he has never been able to deny Steve anything. He swallows and turns, meeting Steve’s eyes, which are quieter than they were this morning. A soft kind of blue, mixed ever so slightly with green, and looking at him Bucky feels his own weakness.

“It was in a bunker,” he says. The words scrape him hollow. “It was supposed to be clear. Abandoned years ago. But there was some trap, something we missed.” He’s thought through it a hundred times since, but still he can’t recall anything different about the place: the air was stagnant and stale, the same as always. And then it became hot and choked with dust. The stone spattered with blood. “It was just bad luck,” he says, “where you were standing. The place started caving in. And by the time I could shift the debris enough to get out—” He shrugs. “Nothing anyone could do.”

He’s still looking at Steve, because he owes it to Steve to say it to his face, to give him the truth even when it hurts—and he can see that it hurts him in the parting of his lips and the skin around his eyes. “Just bad luck,” Steve echoes.

Beneath his right palm, the wood of the dresser is worn smooth as he leans against it. The left feels only the pressure. “It was quick,” he says, and amends the lie in his head: _quick enough._ A mercy, he tells himself. Steve doesn’t need to know the way he fell, the way Bucky caught him, their bodies pressed so close, harsh breath filling the remaining air and a slick wet heat seeping through their clothes. It had been a struggle to avoid the falling concrete, and for a moment Bucky had staggered under the sudden weight in his arms, quick steps that came faster than thought, no space between them. Like dancing. And Steve doesn’t need to know how terrifying the silence had been when Bucky dragged him up into the air, how cold the stars seemed and how the emptiness had stretched for miles and taken root, horribly, finally, within.

Steve is oblivious; he nods. “That’s good.” He looks—God, he looks as lost as he said he was before, like he’s realizing now the cruelty of it. His fingers are pressing into the blanket on the bed, his curving turning inward.

“Hey,” Bucky says, moving forward, “hey, it’s—” and he stops, because it isn’t _all right_ or _okay_ or _not so bad._ It’s true that for him the pain isn’t raw anymore; it’s scabbed and scarred, but it lingers, a low throb, an ache in the bones. And right now Bucky feels it in places he hadn’t known could feel this type of hurt: the small of his back, the soles of his feet, the place between neck and shoulder where a head is meant to rest. So he sits next to Steve and pulls him close. “Just breathe,” he says, because he can remember that Steve has trouble with that sometimes, and he could use the reminder himself.

The pulse pounding against his own begins to quiet and, somehow, Steve’s hand is holding his. “You said things were good,” Steve murmurs, “for a while.”

“For years,” Bucky tells him. “It felt like forever.” And it had, while it lasted.

Steve’s fingers shift over Bucky’s. “I never left you, did I? We _were_ together?”

“Always,” Bucky says. “We still are.”

The soft sigh brushes Bucky’s hair against his neck, and then he feels Steve’s lips on his skin: a gentle touch he might have imagined if not for the cataclysm inside him—but it doesn’t feel so much like shattering, anymore. He lifts Steve’s chin and kisses him the way he remembers, and it isn’t the same, but it doesn’t feel so unbearable as it did.

———

At some pitch-dark hour, Bucky opens his eyes with his breath choked in his throat, and lies there until he realizes what caused the alarm. It’s the breathing: below the constant groaning wind, he can hear Steve’s steady inhales and exhales beside him. Strange, that that should be enough to startle him so badly when there was a time—whole years, separated by the better part of a century but no less real for that—when anything else was unimaginable.

He sits up carefully and rests his elbows on his knees, rubs his temples. He smells like Steve. They fell asleep holding each other, he remembers, desperately close, the way they probably haven’t since 1943. His arms remember the feeling, and that’s strange, too, because these arms have never held that body.

Bucky sighs. The ticking of Steve’s watch is just barely audible beneath the wind and the breathing, and it’s surprisingly relentless for so small a sound. And to think, it ticked on through all that time, maybe not in the ice but certainly afterwards, counting the countless seconds. And now there are so few left.

Steve’s hand touches his back, so tentatively it doesn’t make him jump. “Buck?” His voice quiet and sleep-roughened.

In answer, Bucky reaches down and holds his hand. He’s spent days being so cautious, so afraid to touch; now he feels any absence like an icy winter wind. He remembers how it was before, but he hadn’t thought it would be possible again—can the heart come back from being broken so many times? Can anything grow in such barren land?

Like the night before, Steve leans on his shoulder, this time without the threat of tears. “You feel the same,” he says.

“That’s ‘cause you’re on my right side,” Bucky tells him.

“Maybe,” Steve says, doubtful. After a moment he stretches and lies back down, tugging at Bucky’s elbow until he follows suit. The sheets are still warm. “What if I could change it?” Steve whispers when they’re face-to-face on the pillow again.

“Change what?” Bucky asks.

“The future.” Steve’s fingers are in his hair. “The past. Whatever you want to call it.”

Dread unspools in the back of Bucky’s mind, but it’s not enough to worry him with Steve so close, so blissfully _here._ “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he says, sleep already reaching up to claim him, the sweetest surrender he’s known in two years.

Steve murmurs something that must be agreement; he nestles into the warmth of the bed and their bodies.

His head fits under Bucky's chin the way it always has, even when he was bigger. Bucky kisses his hair. With the scent of him everywhere, the air between them finally peaceful, Bucky can almost imagine there is time left to them.

———

They don’t talk about it, tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Bucky waits with trepidation for Steve to broach the subject, but he doesn’t, and Bucky doesn’t ask why. He’s content with Steve at the edges of his vision, Steve beside him in bed, Steve at his elbow in the barn as he fixes the cultivator and one step ahead when they cook in the evenings. If he never brings it up again, Bucky can be happy. Or he can try.

Despite his hopes, though, it isn’t really a surprise when Steve comes to find him in the field. Bucky is waist-deep in the wheat, running his right hand palm-down over the top of the grain, the heads bowing before his touch. “How is it?” Steve asks.

“Mature,” Bucky tells him. He realizes from Steve’s blank face that of course this means nothing to him—and it wouldn’t have meant anything to Bucky, either, until two years ago, raised as he was in the city and then shuttled from cryo to battle to chair. He takes a spike of grain in his hand and shows it to Steve. “See, when I press it”—he pinches one of the kernels between his metal fingers—“there’s no milk. Barely even a dent.” He holds another spike out for Steve to try. “Means it’s ripe. Ready to harvest.”

“Oh.” Steve nods, but there’s a question in his eyes.

Bucky answers with a shrug. “I just kind of picked it up, all the farm stuff. When I came out here, there wasn’t much else to do, and the woman who owned this place was happy enough to let me take it off her hands. So I figured out how to do it.”

“And now you’re growing wheat,” Steve says, “in the middle of nowhere.” There’s an expression on his face that Bucky doesn’t like, worrying in its intensity. The wind gusts suddenly, harder than before, and nearly carries Steve’s next words away: “So this is it, huh?”

“What?”

Steve’s mouth twists. “I go back, eventually,” he says, half-shouting to be heard, “and, what, they just put me in that machine and everything happens according to plan? And a few decades down the line I’m d—”

“Steve—”

“—I’m dead,” Steve insists, “and you’re farming some empty patch of land with no one at all? That’s how it works out?”

“No,” Bucky says, “it’s not like that.” He isn’t sure what he’s denying, because the situation is exactly as Steve’s just described it; more than anything he doesn’t want to hear Steve say _I’m dead_ again, isn’t sure he can take it in his new fragility. And now Steve is squinting out towards the invisible mountains in the east, his eyes screwed up against the gale. “Can we go inside?” Bucky asks, reaching out for his arm.

At his touch, Steve takes off, wading through the wheat towards the barn with a jerk of his head so that Bucky will follow. When they’re out of the wind, Bucky shuts the heavy door and turns to find Steve leaning on the workbench, intently focused on a stalk of wheat in his hands which he’s slowly stripping into pieces. He doesn’t say anything.

Bucky realizes after a second that he’s waiting for Bucky to speak first. Giving him the floor, even though he’s clearly ready for a fight. So he says, “I don’t know what you think you can change, when you go back. And I know I can’t stop you from trying, but—but maybe you shouldn’t, maybe it’s better you don’t.”

Steve snorts as if he can’t help himself. “Better like this?” His fingers pry the kernels apart, mutilate the husks.

That stings, though it has no right to. “At least we had a life,” Bucky says. “If you change things, who knows what we’ll get?”

“A better life,” Steve says. He throws the mangled wheat to the ground and pushes off of the workbench to walk towards Bucky. He takes his hands and looks into his face—imploring, desperate. “Something more than this. A home, some time together—a life where you’re not alone.”

In spite of himself, Bucky smiles, just a little. “I’m not alone right now,” he points out. “And besides—we had all that, Stevie. You and me. We had years.”

Steve shakes his head. “But it’s over. And sooner or later this’ll be over, too.”

“Oh, God, Steve.” Bucky takes him in his arms reflexively and feels Steve embrace him in return. “It’s been over so many times. I didn’t think I’d get a second chance, let alone four.”

“Four?”

“It’s been a long life,” Bucky says. And it’s never felt longer than in the past week, strange when he considers that Steve is only at the beginning, with so far to go. It makes him lightheaded. He clutches Steve tighter until it passes.

“What if I could give us more time?” Steve asks, his voice muffled by Bucky’s body.

Bucky sighs. “What if you take away the time we have?” It’s like the night before with his chin resting on top of Steve’s head and their arms around each other: sometimes he thinks he’s spent his entire life holding Steve, even in that dim time when he didn’t remember Steve existed, even in the two years since he’s been so truly alone. Holding a ghost to his skin as if the touch and the wanting would bring it back to life. And now, miraculously, it has.

They stand there for a moment, still. But then Steve pulls away, his eyes softer than before, though he shows no sign of yielding. He opens his mouth. “You—”

And Bucky finds, to his own surprise, that he doesn’t need to hear it. That he doesn’t want to know all the reasons Steve thinks the future needs to be changed—he’s known them for a while now, he’s been arguing with Steve every time he’s brought them up since he arrived here. _Alone,_ Steve had said, _angry._ “Maybe you’re right,” he says, surprising Steve enough that he falls silent. “Like I said, I can’t stop you.”

Steve frowns at that. “And either way,” he says slowly, “whatever I do, I won’t know if it’s any different than what happened the first time, will I?” There’s a dissatisfied set to his mouth. “Guess we’re at a dead end.”

“I don’t know,” Bucky muses, watching Steve’s forehead furrow in confusion, unbearably fond of the crease that appears between his eyebrows. Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised that Steve has come back to him. He always was a stubborn bastard. “I didn’t ever think I’d have to live without you. It wasn’t ever… It never occurred to me, not really. Even in the war.” He doesn’t say which war, because it’s the same either way. It was the two of them wrapped tight around each other, all the way from Brooklyn into the unimaginable future; for Bucky, there had been no other life. “But I did. And now I don’t. And it’s all—” He waves a hand at the barn, at nothing at all. “None of it happened the way I thought it would, not once. And things could be worse.”

“Well.” Steve gives him a tentative smile. “We’ll just have to wait and see how it ends up, then, huh?”

It’ll never cease to amaze him, Bucky thinks: the unceasing movement of the world, that he can lose so much and so often and still feel love like this. That the future and the past can be so uncertain, yet the moments themselves bring him joy with each new heartbeat. Bucky smiles back and it feels like the spring, like old earth cracking to make way for the green.

———

“I’ll make you ciorbă,” Bucky says in the supermarket, hefting a bag of rice. “It’s Romanian. You always ordered it at this place in Midtown.”

“Manhattan?” Steve wrinkles his nose. “Why on earth—”

“That’s where we lived,” Bucky tells him. “For a while,” he adds, placating, when Steve sputters in indignation.

That night he does make ciorbă, and the meatballs aren’t quite perfect, but they’re all right—and Steve puts down his spoon after one bite. “I liked this?” he demands. “I _like_ this, in the future?”

Bucky shrugs, confused. “You sure ate a lot of it.”

“Mm.” Steve takes another hesitant mouthful and shakes his head. “Probably just fuckin’ with you.”

Bucky stares at him, and Steve winks. Their hands together on the kitchen table, scratched and wobbly with mismatched legs, make a shape there that they never did before.

———

Steve’s fingers trace the ridged scars at his shoulder. “Does it still hurt?”

“Not really.” Bucky watches him move his hand down to follow the golden filigree woven through the metal arm. “This is better than the first one I had. Not as heavy.” And the only people he’s killed with it were his choice—and even that is over now, in the past where it belongs.

“It’s beautiful,” Steve remarks.

That makes Bucky smile, a little rueful. He remembers all the times Steve said he hated the arm, what it meant and what it came from. “You think so?”

Almost absentmindedly, Steve threads their fingers together, his other hand coming up to brush Bucky’s hair back. “You’re beautiful, too,” he says. His eyes move over Bucky’s face as if it’s a new sight, and maybe for him it still is—not yet familiar with the lines that time has added.

For Bucky, too, Steve is different: his body is a faded memory, smaller and more angular, and he moves in ways that barely tug at familiarity. But it’s him, it’s him, kissing Bucky now without the weight of the years, and it no longer feels like a loss.

———

The wheat is ready and has been for some time: it stretches golden and top-heavy to the sky, glinting in the sun that dims with the coming autumn. “I’ll help,” Steve offers, but he can hardly lift the scythe, let alone swing it.

So Bucky goes to the field alone. He tries not to let the fear make itself known, gnawing as it has been at the back of his mind, the reason he’s delayed and the reason he doesn’t look back, now. The wheat falls when he cuts it and the shorn stalks crunch underfoot. Anxiety fills in the edges of his vision.

The wind screaming in his ears distracted him when he first came here—swept unforgiving across the flat steppe and drowned out the howling of his grief. It was a miracle the house itself was still standing, more miraculous still that it’s more than just a house to him now. A refuge. A second skin. The bones that hold him up.

Cut, swing, cut, swing. Back and forth. The day is cool, nearly cold, but Bucky sweats from the effort and his pulse blends with the wind. The house is a smudge on the horizon from where he is now, and he feels alone—for all he knows, he could be. He wishes he knew when, wishes he could tell Howard to hurry up and pull the trigger, wishes for more time or to have had none at all. He worries that the precious sweetness will turn sour if it drags on indefinitely. And yet it _is_ so precious, so remarkable, this gift he’s been given. Even if it hurts him in the end. They are happy together—after a time, and in their own way.

The sweat dries cold on his skin and makes him shiver by the time he turns back. There will be more to do tomorrow and more after that, and then the threshing, and on and on into winter. Bucky wonders how long it will be—if he’ll be alone by then. The fear chokes him suddenly as he nears the house. It could be that he’s alone already, all the rooms empty, no one left to hum from out of sight and make the air alive.

But Bucky squints, and then he can make out the figure standing there in the cut field waiting for him—Steve, braced against the gale. Here for another day or hour or minute, but here, and with so much before him. A life that might be anything. The wind whips at his hair; he looks almost tall beneath the scudding clouds and the open, endless sky.

**Author's Note:**

> If playlists are your thing, I've made one [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/tardis-demon-detective/playlist/0Dqi2VVRxt6s05MtRozY0M?si=qYBON7DQSPCmeiqg8K5ukA) (track listing [here](http://blanketed-in-stars.tumblr.com/post/177287488304/old-earth-a-stevebucky-playlist-listen-on)).
> 
> The song Steve picks out is The Very Thought of You" [(I like the version by Al Bowlly).](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bw5h-WPYBQ)
> 
> A few things were fudged, altered, or just hand-waved away: most notably the geography and climate of Siberia and the process of wheat farming. The time-travel stuff was, of course, made up wholesale :)
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! Comments are love <3


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